Activity Overlapping Assessment in Construction, Oil, and Gas Projects

Increasing demand for project completion in a shorter duration has led to various methods of schedule compression techniques, that a well known among them is fast tracking that refers to overlapping activities that normally would be done in sequence. Fast tracking (overlapping) can reduce the execution time of a project while at the same time can result in rework, extra costs and increased risks as evident by many construction projects. In order to limit the risks of fast tracking and to gain maximum advantage, a tradeoff between benefits and losses of activity overlapping is required. Such a tradeoff requires a systematic and practical approach. For this purpose an analysis has been conducted over the inherent nature of overlapping to develop a new framework for optimizing activity overlapping in construction projects. The main objective of this paper is to introduce such a framework and the hypothesis behind it. The paper will also include the theoretical justification of the suggested framework to verify that the framework can be both reliable and practical to be used by project managers to find the optimum overlapping between activities to reduce the negative risks including sources of cost overruns and time delays.